I was thinking about this the other day when a friend of mine recommended a truly awful fantasy series to me to read. It has nothing in it of depth or substance, but rather is a silly, boyish adventure story. I believe the fun and fantastic may be exactly what attracted the aforementioned friend to the story and to the speculative genre in general -- but that's not me.

I find speculative fiction to be an honest and imaginative way to turn a mirror on the human condition. Things we could not say in mainstream literature for fear of it being "politically incorrect" is fair game when wrapped in magic, aliens, or future technology. What if becomes, in an abstract sense, what is.

I also love the abstraction. It can be boring to think about the same mirrored topics in terms of what they really are. I find them easier to swallow in the form of speculative fiction or comedy....sometimes both, as in Douglas Adams.

I enjoy fun and magic, the exotic and exciting, the strange and bizarre, but I do not enjoy these things for themselves. I look for and expect meaning and am disappointed when I don't find it.

But then, for me, it has to retain enough of the human element for me to relate to the story. I do want to care about the characters.

I like the exotic places as well. I think it allows someone to write a story with more clarity. If you set it in modern times, and there's a cop in the story...well, I already have an idea of what cops are like. If you portray them drastically different, I won't believe the story. Fantasy, however, when you're inventing it all...I don't have a frame of refrence full of preconception and prejudicies.

Miriel:

I love this genre because, firstly, a lot of writers in it are still here to entertain.

Minister:

I think the biggest reason I keep going back to particular writers in the field is their ability as storytellers.

This is the problem I have with UK slipstream fiction, which for me is just miserablist fiction under a different name. It certainly doesn't entertain (leaves you feeling decidedly sullied in fact) and they certainly aren't storytellers as 'story' never comes into these mood pieces!

When I first began writing it was mostly genre work - SF, fantasy, horror - and although now I tend towards stories concerning the breakdown of relationships, with a twist of magic realism to them ('Time' is a big theme in my stories), with the exception of a few writers like John Irving and Margaret Atwood it's all genre writers I read. I just love the flow of invention! Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter for them awesome special effects eat-your-heart-out-CGI panoramas. China Mieville's captivating portrayal of a city, Connie Willis's characters and humour and her ability to put you RIGHT THERE. Or Richard Morgan's kickass debut of the decade, 'Altered Carbon'.

These people are so much fun to read! Mainstream fiction, by comparison, seems so staid. It doesn't have anyone like that delightful Terror from Texas, Joe R. Lansdale, or our very own hyperactive Harlan Ellison, or that jack-of-all-trades and master of them all, Dan Simmons. Nobody in the mainstream gets excited about its writers the way speculative fiction fandom gets excited about theirs (Worldcon, anyone?). Plus we keep the books alive, with classic reprint lines and anthologies.

I feel the same way about speculative fiction today. The whole, "What if..." theme just calls to my inner day-dreamer.

I read just about anything in any genre, though. From high-brow literary authors to best-selling hacks.

I am carefully selective now about what I read. But my parents just sent me some books, one of which is the most confused scifi novel I've ever seen. Another was a set of alternative history books which were almost plotless, and certainly lacking in significance. The plot was so empty as to be laughable, and every solution came about too easily. There are very good ideas in both of these books and yet they're not developed.

So there has to be more than just interesting ideas in your book. You have to be able to tell a story and make the reader become part of the story. Only then will they see that world as you the writer do.

Or at least that's my sense of things. Maybe I don't truly appreciate speculative fiction, but as an outsider to the literary world, I think it sounds a bit jargony and pretentious.

What do people here think of the term and what it means? I suppose I should do a search before I ask that question; I'm sure it's been discussed ad nauseum.

That said, what attracted me about speculative fiction was the liberation of imagination it encouraged -- the way it so easily became fuel for my own daydreams and often escapist fantasies. Straight drama can certainly capture me and make me feel a great deal of empathy for the characters, but only with spec. fic. do I really imagine _myself_ in the book's setting.

The fundamental logic and reasoning behind "what if?" also has appealed to me: that is, taking some statements about the world and what we know about science and human behavior and extrapolating beyond.

djvdakota said

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Other forms of fiction aren't interested in their readers, they're just interested in politics.

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Not to say that political opinon and statement are absent in spec fic. Here we can extrapolate to extremes and allow readers to come to their own conclusion (think: "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Tick Tock Man").

A mention here reminded me of my own early interest in space and the space program. About the time I got to grasping all the fine details of what it would take to actually become an astronaut (y'know, "hard work,") I ran into science fiction. (I was nine.)

(A portion of that was dumb luck. I'd been reading some books out of the school library by one Marguerite Henry, and my fingers wandered down to these books by one Robert A. Heinlein. I wondered if they were any good. Boy, were they ever!)

Suddenly I was in a place, where I could get to anywhere in Space / Time, any time I wanted it, only by opening a book and reading.

I suppose it was inevitable that I'd move on from reading it to writing it. I'd made up formless stories in my mind, scribbled-and-erased action cartoons while daydreaming in school classes, or acted out this and that with objects around the house.

(Blame Asimov for giving me the idea to write something resembling a story---if he hadn't'a published "The Early Asimov" when he did, it might have taken years for the idea to pop up in my mind.)

What got me into specfic was my family. They've always been proliferate readers, and I think I asorb no less than a 250+ page novel per week because of it. My grandparents' house had a bookshelf devoted entirely to my mom and two uncles' sci-fi/fantasy collection, as well as grandma's fantasy works. Some of the first stuff I read was Heinlein's boys' adventures, such as Space Cadet, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, Rocketship Gallileo and Red Planet.

From there I moved up to harder stuff as I got older and was better able to understand the words and the characters' view-points. I read Immorality, Inc. as well as several of the Clarke books, and some of the books whos names I don't remember but whose plots I vaguely recall.

As I moved along, I read almost solely the works of Heinlein until I finished them all at least twice when I was 19. Realizing that dead authors tell no tales, I began to flex out and look for other authors. More Clarke, Asimov, Haldeman and Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy (which I read out of order starting with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: I highly recommend reading them out of order... they actually make more sense) all fell into my lap and pulled me off into other authors.

Someone suggested i give Ender's Game a try, and I did and couldn't put the book down. I gave it far more devotion than I ever gave any other book. From there I read Speaker for the Dead, but couldn't read Xenocide because by the third chapter I was intensely bored of the book. Then I found Ender's Shadow, and have just today completed Shadow of the Giant. I read them in order and loved them all immensely. I always identified mored with Peter than Andrew anyway. Not that I'm sadistic and evil, though. I could never see the fun in pulling insects apart, let alone birds and squirrels.

Lately, I've read a lot of authors that run outside my usual circles. I've read most of Christopher Stasheff's Warlock series. I've read all, I think, of Robert Aspirin's Myth series. I know I've read the complete Discworld series. I've read a few of Neil Gaiman's works, as well as the works of Stephen King and Robert J. Sawyer. I've read probably every single Heinlein book to date, as well as Anne McCaffrey's Tower and the Hive series.

Finally, most recently, I've actually begun to read the Pern books. I'm on White Dragon, my first read-through. It's a bit slow-going, but I want to see why the hell people say my story of a lost colony reminds them so damnably much of Pern.

So far, I'm seeing a lot of dragons, some smatterings of lost technology being refound, and a somewhat similar plot: the red planet throws thread and thus creates havoc. In my story, an intergalactic war breaks out when humans discover that half the galaxies they've colonized have already been colonized by a silicon-based life-form, whose home-world happens to be in the same sector as my colony's planet. Really. Quite similar. I'm amazed. It's like I've been reading Anne McCaffrey's mind for years!

Anyhow, facetiousness aside, what keeps me reading this genre above all others is that it doesn't have to plague itself with over-development of a character just to advance the page-count. The characters develop from the stories and the stories develop from the characters. In literature, very rarely does the character actually undergo anything truly signifigant.

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Maybe the question I should be asking then is: What isn't speculative fiction? Isn't all fiction by nature speculative? What type of written literature is left when we subtract the types we've discussed here?

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While technically any story can be phrased in a "What if..?" question, only speculative fction uses this question to redefine reality. While a mystery story might ask, "What if an obsessive-compulsive private investigator goes out and solves crimes?" (Monk) there is nothing in this question that redefines reality as we know it. It's an amusing concept, certainly, but technically not impossible or any kind of redefinition of the way the world works.

On the other hand: "What if people lived in a fantasy world called 'Middle Earth' in which an evil power was trying to take over the world and twist it to its own purposes?" suggests a significant departure from reality.

And what happens if the winner wants most for some dead person to be brought back to life?

P.S. I failed to answer the original question. I guess because when I was a kid I didn't usually daydream about being an intermediary clerk or an insurance claims adjuster or some of the other careers one might find in modern naturalistic fiction.

The book isn't about the society at all. It's from the point of view of one of the walkers. It starts with the start of the walk and ends when he's done with the walk (one way or another). The society that would allow such a thing has nothing to do with the story and so there are two ways of looking at it. One, suspend disbelief. I promise King makes it worth such a suspension. Two, don't suspend disbelief. You don't really have to. Frankly, humans are viscious enough creatures that I don't find it such a stretch at all. I don't believe we're that far above the Romans and their baser forms of entertainment where human life was concerned. It's nice that today we can watch people pretend to die in movies -- otherwise we might crave blood.

I think that the story could work outside the specualtive fiction area, like if you set it in a death camp or something (the Nazies would play this kind of game all the time, and I'm sure other people have too). But by failing to make the story an examination of how something like this could happen, King is cheating big-time.

Now, I'm not saying they're all like that (such a statement would be arrogant, obtuse, and false)...I'm just saying that I've faced fewer disappointments within the speculative fiction arena. That doesn’t mean I haven’t read some bad stuff that was speculative…because I have, though such situations are far less frequent. Many times, the ‘bad’ stuff has been my own. Eh…Freudian slip. Disregard that.

Perhaps it's also the prevalence of military-based themes in speculative fiction that draws me. I've always been interested in things tactical (from Sun Tzu to Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six). It's really a jumble of different elements mixed together that draws me to speculative fiction more often than any other genre. In fact, personal taste and character/personality probably influence this trend as heavily as everything else I’ve mentioned.

And besides...speculative fiction the genre I most enjoy writing. I guess that has something to do with it, too.

I know, I know. Those are the books you hated to read in English class. Those books that sacrificed good characterization and plot in order to advance the theme. I hated those books, too, but that's why I'm writing theme-driven speculative fiction. I remember sitting in English class and thinking, "This wouldn't be so bad if these books were entertaining."

To be particular, Pattern Recognition had two clearly speculative elements that were absolutely critical to the story. One (revealed near the end of the story) was rather more fantastic than the other, but both were over that thin line between things that are known to really happen and things that are made up but seem like they could happen based on what we now know.

1. The first thing this question got me thinking about, was what is Spec Fic. I would sugegst that all fiction is speculative by the nature of being fiction. Almost every work of fiction (if I say 'every work' I know someone will slap me down) is dealing with a what if question. I'd like to propose that the difference between Spec Fic and all the other stuff is the that the other stuff asks "What if this possible thing happens?" while Spec Fic asks "what if this impossible thing happens?" Not sure if that's right, but it's a thought.

2. Having come up with that I was absolutely nowhere nearer working out why I love to read and write Spec Fic. I don't read or write it exclusively, but I do always come back to it. Partly it's the excitement, I think. That sensation of being dipped into a new world, wallowing in someone else's imagination. It's about escapism and adrenaline. To coin someone else's phrase it's about a sense of wonder.
I don't think that Spec Fic has the exclusive rights to exploring society or moral rights and wrongs, to having theme-driven, plot-driven, character-driven, or any other type of driven fiction, or anything else for that matter. I simply find it is the genre that, on the whole, involves the greatest amount of imagination. And that's what I love about it.

Also, if you look at "The Wild Wild West," many of the plots could be considered science fiction because they pivoted on 19th century technology being used for diabolical 20th century inventions.

Whereas with most other contemporary fiction, most people will think that the story could have happened. That's the line that most people use in deciding whether something is "speculative", the thin distinction between something that could happen and something that could have happened.

Which is why, despite Wargames having a semi-sentient computer at the heart of the premise, many people who watch it don't really think of it as SF, while they would definitely consider a movie like Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome as being way over the line.

For myself, I identified both those movies as being very much speculative. And how about Hidalgo? It's an outright fantasy, not only because it didn't happen but because it couldn't have happened. There was something of a stink about that, since the movie was marketed not just as "not fantasy" but as "based on a true life story". But that isn't the point...if I have one.